Out of the Darkness

Another Gyongyosian strode toward him. He won that fight, too, and waved for a third challenger. By then, every part of him hurt. He didn’t think he would win the third fight, and he didn’t. The other captive thumped his head against the floor, once, twice. . . . That was the last thing he remembered.

They could have killed him after he was out. When he woke up again, he rather wished they had. They’d kicked him around some. He could feel that. But it was almost lost in the thudding, nauseating pain in his head. He’d had his wits scrambled for him, sure as sure. He had trouble remembering where he was and even who he was. He did remember how three other captives in the barracks had got pretty good sets of lumps of their own, though. That gave him a certain small satisfaction, when he wasn’t hoping his own head would fall off.

Corporal Kun walked into the barracks perhaps half an hour after Istvan came to. He took one look at Istvan and realized what must have happened to him. He had time for one horrified yelp before somebody said, “All right, squealer--your turn now.” The captives fell on him and beat him bloody, but he was still breathing when they stopped. Maybe Istvan had won enough respect to keep them from wanting to kill his comrade any more.

At the roll call that evening, the Kuusaman guards stared at Istvan. “What you to do?” one of them asked.

“Nothing,” he said stolidly. Where he had trouble recalling his name, he did remember the oath he’d sworn. The guards eyed Kun. He didn’t look quite so bad as Istvan--and, somehow, he’d managed to keep his spectacles from shattering-- but he was no beauty. Neither were the men who’d fought Istvan one after the next.

The guards shook their heads and shrugged. They’d seen such things before. This time, at least, they weren’t carrying corpses from the captives’ camp.

A couple of days later, Istvan got summoned out of the camp for another interrogation with Lammi, the forensic sorcerer. By then, some of his bruises had turned truly spectacular colors. His ribs looked like a sunset. His face was no bargain, either. When he made his way into Lammi’s tent--ducking through the flap hurt, too--the mage’s jaw dropped. “By the stars!” she exclaimed in her good Gyongyosian. “What happened to you?”

No matter how well she spoke his language, Istvan didn’t like to hear her use such oaths--what regard would the stars have for a foreigner like her? He answered as he’d answered the guard: “Nothing.”

Lammi shook her head. “A little more nothing like that and they would lay you on a pyre. Now--tell me at once what happened to you.”

“Nothing,” Istvan repeated.

“You are a stubborn man. I have seen that,” she said. “But you know I have ways to get answers from you.”

“Nothing happened,” Istvan said. As he’d expected, his command of his senses disappeared. Lammi might have miscalculated there. Taking away his senses took away his pain, too, the first relief he’d had from it since the fights. And she’d robbed him often enough, he was starting to get used to it. He didn’t mistake her voice for that of the stars any more.

Presently, she brought him back to himself. “You are a very stubborn man,” she said.

“Thank you,” he answered, -which made her blink.

She needed a moment to rally. “I think,” she said, “we would do well not to send you back to your barracks.” She picked up a crystal and spoke into it in Kuusaman, which Istvan didn’t understand. Whoever was on the other end of the etheric connection answered in the same language. The crystal flared, then went inert. Lammi looked back to Istvan. “Corporal Kun, it seems, is also sporting bruises. How did that happen?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, and waited to go back to the unworld of no sight, no hearing, no smell, no taste, no touch. He looked forward to losing the sense of touch once more: indeed he did.

Lammi made an exasperated noise. “How can we find and punish the men who beat you if you will not tell us who they are?”

“What men?” Istvan said. The forensic sorcerer made another, louder, exasperated noise. With a shrug, Istvan went on, “I told you, nothing happened.”

“Aye, that is what you told me,” Lammi agreed. “And I am telling you once more, Sergeant, that, had a little more of such nothing happened, you would now be dead, and we would not be having this discussion.” Istvan shrugged again. She was probably--no, certainly--right. She glowered at him. “We will be removing you from the captives’ camp for your own protection. You do understand that?”

With one more shrug, Istvan answered, “You are the captors. I am the captive. You can do as you like with me. If you do too much, and word gets back to Gyongyos, your own captives will suffer.”